In assessing the current level of implementation of an indicator of effective professional practice in the district or school, the goal is not to simply check off an item but to acquire a deeper understanding of the practice and achieve a high degree of consistent application of it.

1. Indistar®
A New Approach to District and School Improvement:
The Right Data, at the Right Time, and a Process to
Understand and Apply the Data
In his book The Information: A Theory, A His-
tory, A Flood, James Gleick (2011) traces the
evolution of “information” from ancient African
drummers sending messages across the miles
to the vast and retrievable storehouse of data
in the internet’s cloud. While we now firmly
reside in the Age of Information, we have not
quite caught up with the enormous and rapidly
changing opportunity that technology pro-
vides. We struggle with Information Overload.
Finding, sorting, filtering, categorizing, under-
standing, and applying needed information
remains a challenging proposition. Of course,
this isn’t a new experience. Aristotle looked at
the immense natural, social, and political world
and sought to organize it into understandable
categories and definitions. That has been the
work of philosophers and scientists ever since.
Linnaeus did the same thing two thousand
years after Aristotle by establishing a system
to categorize and define the species of animals
and plants. Educators, charged with bringing
a vast, varied, and often conflicting research
base into practice, seek ways to streamline the
inflow of information, make sense of it, and
structure it in useful ways.
For more than a decade, the standard ap-
proach to district and school improvement has
been to:
1. analyze student outcome data;
2. identify areas of relative weakness;
3. set goals to remediate the shortcomings;
and
4. develop annual plans to achieve the
goals.
This approach is simple enough, and seems
to make sense. But it suffers from flaws in logic
that have made it an anemic driver of improve-
ment, including:
1. outcome data do not reveal the causes
of the outcomes, so data on professional
practice are necessary to complete the
equation;
2. relative weaknesses (and strengths) fluc-
tuate from time to time, making us chase
after moving targets;
3. districts and schools are complex or-
ganizations, and the interplay of many
factors across the district or school cul-
ture impact outcomes—basing goals on
isolated, current weaknesses in student
outcomes over-simplifies the cause-
effect relationships;
4. reaching goals means changing practice,
and knowing which practice to change
and how to change them requires a clear
grasp of the immense body of often con-
flicting research literature;
5. understanding effective practice and
knowing the current level and extent of
effective practice in the district or school
still falls short of knowing how practice is
changed;
6. changing practice in a district or school
culture means changing the culture itself,
expecting universal fidelity to sound
practice rather than targeted interven-
tion with the currently perceived areas

2. of weakness determined only by out-
come data.
Or, to put it more simply, what adults do de-
termines how students perform. While we have
developed sophisticated means for assessing
student outcomes, our methods for assessing
professional practice and continuously improv-
ing it fall short. The two data sources—what
adults do and how students perform—go hand-
in-hand, and basing improvement efforts only
on one without the other will not drive signifi-
cant improvement.
In the final analysis, the people closest to the
student have the greatest impact on the stu-
dent’s performance. An effective improvement
process places tools and
resources in these peo-
ple’s hands. The process
is not as simple as the
development of a plan.
The improvement process
itself must be a “learn-
ing experience” for the
people engaged in it so
that they constantly grow
in their understanding
of the process itself and
the professional practices that affect student
performance. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
(2009) explains that learning is dramatically
accelerated when conducted within the “sweet
spot” where the challenge is sufficient to sus-
tain engagement and the task is within rea-
sonable reach. An improvement process must
provide adequate structure and guidance while
still leaving room for the people engaged in it to
struggle a bit to gain understanding and skill.
The Indistar® system provides the structure,
guidance, and resources for a continuous
improvement process administered by a Lead-
ership Team. Indistar is as much a professional
development process as a planning process.
Engaged in the work with candor and diligence,
the Leadership Team finds itself in the ”sweet
spot,” gaining understanding and skill, solving
problems, applying lessons to the immediate
context, considering the human dimension of
change relative to the people around them.
By extension, the Leadership Team’s work is
carried out by everyone within the district or
school community, enabling them also to gain
understanding and skill.
Indistar assumes that the district or school
has access to student learning data, and if not
then its indicators guide the Leadership Team
in making the data available. Student learning
data includes state assessments, other annual
assessments, periodic (benchmark) assess-
ments, and teachers’ formative assessments.
With these ample sources of information about
what students know and can do, Indistar focus-
es on the other side of the equation—what the
adults do that determines
how students perform. In
this arena, the Leadership
Team and the rest of the
district or school commu-
nity engage in what Coyle
calls “deep practice,”
not mere planning and
reporting but candid and
diligent immersion in the
work.
In assessing the current level of implementa-
tion of an indicator of effective professional
practice in the district or school, the goal is
not to simply check off an item but to acquire
a deeper understanding of the practice and
achieve a high degree of consistent application
of it. To provide evidence of full implementa-
tion, the Leadership Team must ask and answer
several questions:
1. What is the straight-forward, literal
meaning and intent of the indicator?
2. How would we know the extent to which
the indicator is implemented?
3. What data must be analyzed to deter-
mine the level of implementation?
4. What instruments must be created to
gather the data?
5. Who will make the data available?
6. What does it look like now?
By placing the requirement for determin-
ing the necessary data sources, gathering the

3. data, and analyzing the data on the Leadership
Team, the Leadership Team is engaged in “deep
practice.” Not as simple as a checklist, but
much more likely to yield greater understand-
ing and skill and to drive the district or school’s
improvement.
The planning and progress monitoring steps
in Indistar require the same amount of Leader-
ship Team engagement as the assessment step.
The plan is specific to the indicator of effective
practice, now expressed as an objective. The
team first determines “what it will look like”
when the objective is met. The plan must make
sense within the context of the district or or
school. The plan includes actionable tasks, per-
sons responsible, and a timeline. The tasks are
sequential, specific, the practical steps to build
the understanding and capacity of people to
demonstrate full implementation, and the data
needed to know that the objective is met.
The plan for each objective must have a
reasonable expectation of leading to full imple-
mentation, and when it does not, the plan is
revised. In monitoring progress, the Leadership
Team manages the completion of tasks for each
objective and, when tasks are completed for
an objective, the Leadership Team assesses the
level of implementation. If the Leadership Team
determines that the objective has been met,
then the team addresses the questions listed
above. If the Leadership Team determines that
the plan has not resulted in a fully implemented
objective, the plan is revised and more tasks
added. This is not simple work, but “deep prac-
tice.” This is how people learn best and districts
and schools are significantly improved.
To help the Leadership Team (and the dis-
trict and school community) stay on track, sort
through the research, and arrive at a clear
understanding of effective professional practice,
Indistar® provides support through:
1. The coaching feature that enables
someone with expertise external to the
district or school to follow the work of
the Leadership Team, in real time, and
offer guidance.
2. Wise Ways® briefs that provide a con-
text for the indicator, research syntheses,
examples, and references.
3. Indicators in ActionTM
tutorials with nar-
rative and video demonstration of the
indicators by administrators, teachers,
and parents.
Working with indicators, each aligned with
research, is an efficient way to cut through
information overload and narrow the district
or school’s focus to what matters most. Think
of how a curriculum is developed for students.
From all the vast information in the world,
someone must decide what a student should
know and do. In a standards-based system, or-
der is created by establishing goals, standards,
benchmarks, and grade-level or course-level
performance objectives. This is done within
broad subject areas like Reading/Language
Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies. By
establishing these domains and structuring
standards-aligned content within them, a man-
ageable curriculum is built from the vast and
inchoate information in the world. Sounds like
what Aristotle and Linnaeus attempted, doesn’t
it?
Indicators of effective practice are similarly
organized to make sense of the vast information
about professional practice. The typical struc-
ture is Domain (Category in Indistar), Effective

4. Practice (Section in Indistar), Sub-section
(where applicable), Sub-sub-section (where ap-
plicable), and Indicator. Each state determines
its method of categorization and the indicators
to place within it. Organizing effective profes-
sional practice in this way is akin to developing
a standards-based curriculum. It creates order
and reduces the effort necessary to extract
meaning from the research.
In The Social Animal, David Brooks (2011)
describes the psychology of attachment and
the related concept of “reach and reciprocity”.
He quotes John Bowbly, the British psycholo-
gist, saying “All of us, from cradle to grave, are
happiest when life is organized as a series of
excursions, long or short, from the secure base
provided by attachment figures” (p. 61). An ex-
ample of this attachment phenomenon is seen
in the behavior of a toddler in a room with her
mother on one side and a stack of toys on the
other. At first the toddler clings to her mother.
She takes a few steps toward the toys, and then
pauses to look back at her mother. In time, the
toddler
arrives at
the stack of
toys, plays,
but keeps
an eye on
her mother.
This tug and
pull pattern
continues
through life, as we reach, then return to a se-
cure place, and then reach again.
Brooks expands the idea of attachment by
citing the work of Richard Ogle in Smart World.
When we are engaged in learning, Ogle states,
we begin from the base of what we know. Then
we venture into a complex web of informa-
tion beyond our current understanding, absorb
some of it, and then return to our base to
enhance what we know. Then we venture out
again. Piaget would call this the process of as-
similation and accommodation. We are moti-
vated to change in a state of disequilibrium and
strive to achieve equilibrium.
The world of education research is vast. We
begin from what we know, venture out, absorb
new understanding, and then return to our
base to enhance it. Indistar provides a roadmap
in our venturing out and a secure base to which
we can return. Engaged in “deep practice,” we
find the “sweet spot” where we learn best.
References
Brooks, D. (2011). The social animal. New
York: Random House.
Coyle, D. (2009). The talent code. New York:
Bantam Dell.
Gleick, J. (2011). The information: A theory, a
history, a flood. New York: Pantheon Books.
Indistar® and Wise Ways® are registered trademarks
for the Academic Development Institute.
Indicators in Action™ and Indicators Now™ are
trademarks claimed by the Academic Development
Institute.
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Academic Development Institute
121 N. Kickapoo Street Lincoln, IL 62656
t. 217.732.6462 f. 217.732.3696 www.adi.org